Regrets? Ah go, I'll have a few

I had the pleasure of experiencing a garden centre with my parents this weekend. Yes you read that right. A garden centre. On a Saturday. Nearing Christmas. With my parents. Any one of these sentences on its own has been known to induce panic in many a normally sane and sentient human and, as these things go, it was a venture that had come about in a perfect storm of necessity and timing. Whether that was good or bad timing was really up to my patience on the day. But nevertheless, I hadn't seen them properly in a while and I needed a poinsettia. And so I found myself amidst the poinsettias and Christmas fruit cakes listening to my parental units froth at the mouth over the rising price of buds and seeds wondering if I had indeed entered an outdoor version of hell. It didn't help that I seemed to be continually surrounded by groups of clucking women all googly eyed at the gifts and gadgets that now litter normally useful garden centres. Kitchens are now covered with these little kitsch pictures and ornaments found in garden centres. They are all fake distressed wood, straw ropes and etched with 'contemplative' quotes; 'A messy kitchen means a happy cook’; 'Life is a journey'; 'Dance like no-one's watching', to name a few of the banal platitudes. I have no idea why these cloying snippets of 'wisdom' are sold in garden centres, other than the suspicion that they must sell well in there as garden centres create a specific type of nesting feeling in women (see clucking women above) and a king and castle characteristic in men. Or maybe it's the compost fumes. But in between chairing peace talks with my mother and a wide eyed member of staff who really didn't know the correct way to water an orchid and fielding questions from my father about my savings plans, I actually found a quote that struck a chord (again it might have been the compost fumes). ‘Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.’ According to a recent survey we spend more than two hours a week dwelling on our regrets – around 19 minutes a day. From thinking we’ve picked the wrong career/partner/choice of lunch, over a quarter of 2,000 people surveyed believed it was impossible to live a life without regrets. As I witnessed a scrum for cut price Yankee Candles on Saturday I didn’t half know what they meant. In the top ten list of regrets was not spending enough time with our parents and as I stood there in a garden centre, on a Saturday, nearing Christmas, cursing these scrums, queues and feeling a little bit like Bridget Jones but without Hugh or Colin and yet seeing more of my parents than I had in weeks, I decided to buy this cheesy little sign with that quote on regrets. I knew exactly what it was talking about.

The reason I wore a poppy this year

They say that everything is political, well Thomas Mann did anyway. He must have visited Northern Ireland. Here, even your choice of bus could be twisted into apparently declaring a viewpoint on the constitutional position. Wearing the poppy certainly is. This year was the first year I have ever worn a poppy. I hadn’t refrained from wearing one before deliberately, but as a young middle class Catholic who had no immediate connection to anyone who had fought in the world wars, it wasn’t on my radar. I respected Remembrance Day, but this year something was different. In recent days and months, a young PSNI officer Ronan Kerr was killed by a booby trap bomb, a young army medic Channing Day was killed after being shot on patrol in Afghanistan. And then David Black, a prison officer from Cookstown, was murdered on his way to work. There have been many more killed in the line of duty but these three were different for me. Channing and Ronan were very close in age to me and David Black was from a town I practically grew up in. Every day these three put on a uniform and vowed to try and make the world a safer place. They died as a result. Two of them at the hands of those seeking to drag our country back into a time no one ever wants to see again. This year also marked 25 years since the IRA bombed the Remembrance Day ceremony in Enniskillen. This was one of the darkest days of the Troubles. It was a moment of shame for all involved in the violence and yet from that dark and desperate act came the light and hope of Gordon Wilson. His daughter Marie was killed that day and his simple words of forgiveness were, and still are, an inspiration to me and to our province. Standing in Donaghadee at the cenotaph on Sunday I was moved by the dignity and quiet strength of those gathered to pay respects. I thought of how 25 years ago that day Gordon Wilson would have been doing the same and how hours later he somehow found the strength to forgive those who had murdered his daughter. It was people like Gordon who helped create the more peaceful province we now live in. It didn’t matter to me on Sunday that Catholics and Protestants had died together in the Somme, but it was an appropriate context in these times when dissidents have heightened their campaign to dismantle the peace Gordon Wilson helped create and have not discriminated in their victims in trying to do so, targeting innocent people from both sides of the community. And so I chose to wear a poppy this year. Because it has never been more important to show solidarity as a community in our commitment to peace and to show respect for those who have made the ultimate sacrifice to keep us all from harm. We will remember them. Together.